Tuesday, May 22, 2018
On May 21 I bicycled 65 kilometres. I thank my 56-year-old body. It says, "You're welcome."
A local ecologist organized a bicycle-themed weekend that included this ride, a shorter ride, and rhubarb juice: sour, but thirst-quenching.
Born here, she lived in Vancouver and participated in many "Critical Mass" bike rides, designed to remind society that roads are for people and bicycles, not only automobiles. Critical Mass rides helped produce a bike lane on the Burrard Bridge, whose remaining automobile commuters go faster now that so many got out of their cars and onto their bikes, feet, or city buses.
The Critical Mass ride I participated in here in Williams Lake on May 19 featured only ten or so riders, stayed on the shoulder of the highway, and went from the tourist centre at the city's south end to the Potato House, downtown, four kilometres away. The Potato House, an 80-year-old house whose late Italian-born building family grew potatoes all around it, is a local hotbed of ecology. It has hot beds of community gardens outside, exhibits inside, and a rare, drive-through compost station along the alley behind. I dumped my bucket there this morning.
The rhubarb juice, still warm from fermenting, was one reward for us Critical Mass riders. It was sour but it quenched my thirst. I twitch remembering my cousin who used to eat rhubarb raw from our garden. I suppose rhubarb juice would produce alcohol in time, like the cherry juice my parents' friends made, and let us children drink. I had a tasty childhood indeed.
Only four of us rode the 45-km from 150 Mile House Elementary School on May 21. We rode up Horsefly Road to Likely Road, along Mountain House Road, the old Cariboo Gold Rush Trail of the 1860s, to Deep Creek, and back into Williams Lake on Highway 97. Two of us, the other one a man of 68, had ridden the 20-km from Williams Lake to the school before the ride. The other two riders were younger and women, one about 35 and the other 40, the latter the local ecological whirling dervish who organized the weekend. There was no rhubarb juice to end this ride, but there was apple cider from a highway store 10 km before the Williams Lake end of the ride. That was welcome in the 25-degree heat.
The first 10 km were largely uphill, from 2-6% grades. A few km of 3-7% downhill grades followed. A passing motorist photographed us using our organizer's cell phone. The road turned gravel a few km later, and the 20 km of Highway 97 back to Williams Lake was on a shoulder one metre wide, with transport trucks whizzing by. I preferred the earlier, wilderness ride. The last three km into Williams Lake were 1-3% downhill through road construction, as much of the 20 km 1-3% uphill from Williams Lake to the school starting place had been.
I wasn't stiff after the ride, or the next morning, but I treated my obliging body to a swim and hot tub soak in the local pool complex the next morning. A lifeguard told me that every month the lifeguards have a training session, and every two years they take tests to ensure they are still good lifeguards. I wish drivers had such requirements; my last driving test was 23 years ago and I'd gladly take another driving test, to be sure I'm still safe behind the wheel.
After my pool fun, I cycled three km to my tutoring job at the local university campus.
Rolling along on a bicycle is such joy, with or without the nectar of rhubarb, cherries, or apples!
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Matilda Chantyman, Carla's Words
November 6, Monday, 2017
Family and friends,
I heard about Matilda's
(102) passing before lunch. We use to visit her at Kluskus. She had a
small house dog that she called 'Dlig'. The dog was a bit bigger a
squirrel. Hence the name of her dog.
She was a busy and tuff
ol' bird: she attended family funerals at Anaham, other Chilcotin
communities for funerals and celebrations. I have even seen her at a
diabetes conference at Penticton. When she was mobile, I use to see her
at the casino and asking
for five dollars. She use to sit at one of my favorite machines.
There was a time that I
saw her at the Quesnel rodeo activities at the park and listening to the
bands playing rock and roll tunes. She must have had the love of music
and dancing in her genes as did her nephews: late Patrick, late Raymond,
late Raphael,
and late Norman. Music was in their family as her nieces Celina and
late Clara were good at belting out a good tune. Family resemblance was
visible in looks, taste of traveling, meeting 'new' people, making
friends, and attending rodeos, dances, and pow-wows.
With the passing of this
fine elder, is a lost of knowledge, culture, from Tl'etinqox and Kluskus
sides. Just imagine that she lived and traveled The Grease Trial on
foot, with horse and wagon. I am sure that she lived with the seasons,
cattle roundup and
feeding, haying time, and moving from Anaham, Anaham Meadows and Rocky
Point.
Not to mention that she
provided for her family with traditional ways of living. She spoke
fluently in Chilcotin and Carrier language. In her day, school was not a
priority but living of the land was the way of life. The way to survive
was to hunt wildlife,
big and small, fish, deer and moose were packaged and dried, berries,
wild tea, wild potatoes, soapberries were picked and stored for winter
food. There was none of shopping and buying of food at Safeway for this
grand Tsilhqot'in.
This elder has many
great-nieces and great-nephews at Tl'etinqox Government, Tl'etinqox
School, Tsilhqot'in National Government, Negotiations & External
Affairs Office, Punky Lake Wilderness Camp Society, Stone Band and
Alkali Lake Band office: Sharmon
Alphonse, Lorna Elkins, Bella Alphonse, Jodie Jim, Paul Grinder, Randy
Billyboy, Carla Alphonse, Karen Jim, Samantha Jo Dick, Chief Joe
Alphonse, Cecil Grinder, Pamela Alphonse, Janel Alphonse, Justin
Bambrick, Dorothy Alphonse, Darlene Alphonse, Wanda Petal-Dick,
Rhoda Petal, Janet Petal, Erika Petal, and Faye Chelsea, I am sorry if I
missed anyone. It is important to know our family connections. We come
from a strong and remarkable deni.
Matilda Alphonse Chantyman may you greet the good Lord with a smile and open arms. RIP.
Carla Alphonse, CSSC, HSD
Chief's Assistant, Tl'etinqox
Tsilhqot'in National Government
250-394-4212 Extension 206
888-224-3322 Extension 206
250-302-1109 (Cell)
Monday, November 6, 2017
Matilda Chantyman
Hello,
Matilda
Chantyman (b June 3, 1916), Carla's dad's aunt on his dad's side, died. Matilda was living in Quesnel, where Dad was born
in 1919, three years after Matilda, who I think was born in Anaham.
In
2004 and 2006, when I taught in her village of Kluskus, off the road in
the bush about 100 km west of Quesnel, Matilda still lived there, with
her daughter Bella, over 60 then. During winter trips, in a
high-clearance truck for the bush trail, toand from Quesnel, Matilda got
to sit in the front with the little children, but Bella, I, and the
bigger children rumbled along snuggled under blankets in the box. One
winter night, stuck in the bush, Bella had a fire going fast. We
gathered round, waiting for morning and someone to bring a U-joint to
fix the truck. The temperature was only about -10.
"When
I was younger, we used to walk to Ulkatcho," Bella told me. That's
about 140 km west of Kluskus, along the Dakelh-Nuxalt Grease Trail, the
route that Alexander Mackenzie followed westward to Pacific Ocean
tidewater at Bella Coola in 1793. A Bella Coola monument says so. At
Kluskus, I saw little metal signs on trees along the trail, a protected
historic route sometimes traveled still, by foot or horse. "An Indian
is pointing a white man in the wrong direction," Kluskus resident
George Jimmie, one of the high-clearance truck drivers, quipped.
I
met Matilda and Bella in February, 2004 in Bella's house at Kluskus,
which had a 3 x 8-foot table covered in dried moose meat.
In
2016, Carla, Chelsea, and I attended Matilda's 100th birthday party in
the Quesnel friendship centre. I shook a 100-year-old hand. Matilda
asked one of Carla's sisters for a chew of tobacco. Prime Minister
Trudeau's letter to Matilda for turning 100 was on he hall wall.
Perhaps her land, stolen by colonialism, is in the mail.
Williams Lake, The Land Called Canada
Hockey Helmet Pony Tails
Monday, November 6, 2017
Saturday, November 4, skating for the first time this winter season, I liked watching pony tails flying from under hockey helmets worn by several girls, age 9-12, skating in pairs or trios, wearing their hockey sweaters,
No girls played minor hockey when I did, in the 1970s. Girls figure skated. When our coach invited one to show us power skating techniques when I was 12 or so, nobody on my team could catch her.
The activism against fighting in hockey might yet civilize the sport among men and older boys, amateur and professional. "I was watching the fight, when a hockey game broke out."
Poetry in motion, that's what I thought when I watched a couple university women's hockey games in Edmonton a few years ago: finesse, not goonery.
Everybody skate, to "The Skaters' Waltz!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV4BxDcWus8
Saturday, November 4, skating for the first time this winter season, I liked watching pony tails flying from under hockey helmets worn by several girls, age 9-12, skating in pairs or trios, wearing their hockey sweaters,
No girls played minor hockey when I did, in the 1970s. Girls figure skated. When our coach invited one to show us power skating techniques when I was 12 or so, nobody on my team could catch her.
The activism against fighting in hockey might yet civilize the sport among men and older boys, amateur and professional. "I was watching the fight, when a hockey game broke out."
Poetry in motion, that's what I thought when I watched a couple university women's hockey games in Edmonton a few years ago: finesse, not goonery.
Everybody skate, to "The Skaters' Waltz!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV4BxDcWus8
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Ireland, by Leon and Jill Uris
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, its subtitle from the W.B. Yeats poem "Easter, 1916," which I read in my first year English course at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1979, is a 1978 edition of a 1975 book by Leon and Jill Uris. They wrote and published during the British Army occupation of Northern Ireland, and they like neither the army nor the province.
The Hill of Tara, ancient burial mounds, pre-Celtic migrants from Scandinavia and Scotland, perhaps via a land bridge 6000 years ago, Vikings, Normans, the Reformation, the government-induced famine of the 1840s, while cattle were exported, the 1916 events, Partition, Ulster "fascism" in the authors' words, and 1970s despair that peace will never come are in this book from this fall's used book sale in the mall in Williams Lake. Today, when I volunteer again at the sale, I'll return the book, so someone else can have it.
Here I'll write about the book, for my blog readers, especially my sister Maryanne, my 2015 and 2017 Ireland travel partner.
From "Ulster," the title of the last third of the book, here is the authors' view of one section of the police set up in Northern Ireland when Britain granted it province status around 1920:
"Of the auxiliaries, the B-specials, a civil militia of mostly Orangemen, were to gain a
well-deserved infamy for their brutal tactics."
"From the beginning, no protest ever failed to bring on a reaction of overkill. It was a
blunt instrument of totalitarianism. To back up those massive forces, a Special Powers
Act was legislated at the very start to enable this one-party government to arrest anyone
without warrant or reason and to hold him behind bars indefinitely without charges or
rights. It is small wonder this act would become a model law for later fascist regimes
in Europe." (176)
Later, describing Bloody Sunday, the January 30, 1972 British Army murder of 13 peaceful demonstrators among an unarmed crowd in Derry, and its aftermath British inquiry that condemned the army's behavior, the authors write, "if the British had given justice to Ulster's Catholics and had not invoked fascism through Internment, no protest would have been required." (220)
Here is the authors' third and last mention of fascism in Northern Ireland:
"[The British] know that the Ulster love of the Crown had the biggest Catch 22 of them all:
the proposition that Britain was going to be used to allow their quasi-fascist regime to
exist." (277)
Strong words.
Martin McGuinness is young in the book, whose authors would probably not "piss on his grave," unlike an old English man Maryanne met decades later said he would, upon hearing of McGuinness' peaceful death. "After the Battle of Bogside [1969], the I.R.A. Provos came under command of Martin McGuinness, a twenty-two-year-old butcher's apprentice." (215)
On the other side of the barricades, have one of several Orange chants the book quotes:
"A rope, a rope,
Tae hang the Pope!
A pennyworth o' cheese
Tae choke him!
A pint o' lamp oil
Tae wrench it down!
And a big hot give
Tae roast him!
When I was sick,
And very very sick,
And very near a-dying,
The only thing that raised me up
Was to see
The old whore frying!" (180-181)
A few paragraphs later, there's this amusing announcement from a pilot about to land at Belfast airport: "We are about the land in Ulster. Set your watches back 300 years." (181)
Page 214 is about John Hume, "A Voice in the Wilderness." Hume is "the best political brain on the island"and his Social Democratic Labor Party "the most illuminating lights in Ulster politics." The page ends, "it will fall to the John Humes to bring sanity" to Ulster. This later happened. I wonder if he's related to David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher from the 1700s.
A week before Bloody Sunday, in "COs Want Paras Restrained," Simon Hoggart writes in the January 25, 1972 Guardian of British Army units asking that the Parachute Regiment not enter Derry. One unit captain, unnamed, whose commander did not oppose the Paras in Derry, said the paras "seem to think they can get away with whatever they like." (221)
After Bloody Sunday, "the British Embassy was burned down by a Dublin mob." (278)
Father Edward Daly, whose statue we saw in 2017 in Derry, and I wonder if he's related to Sister Daly who taught me Catechism during my First Communion year, when I was 7, is in this book. On Bloody Sunday, he dodged British Army bullets to rescue shot teenagers. He told the authors, "it doesn't matter whether you have a Roman collar or a dog collar." Daly regularly evacuated old people before demonstrations and consequent army attacks. Daly's story, pages 222-24, ends by noting that a year after Bloody Sunday, the paratrooper commander was knighted.
Bloody Sunday gets much attention from the authors, writing only a couple years after it. The event still weighs on Ireland. We saw a demonstration about it outside Belfast City Hall in 2015.
Here are a couple pithy quotes:
"The British Army has performed with total consistency in Ireland since the
Reformation as an anti-Catholic force of conquest, occupation, and suppression."
(232)
"[Belfast] is the mongoloid child of British imperialism." (247)
Innocent Protestants in Ulster suffered, too. Stephan Parker, 14, whose Belfast liberal pastor father "sought Christian answers to the crushing events," died when a July, 1972 I.R.A. bomb blasted the grocery store where he worked. "There is something Godlike about Joe Parker and his wife [Dorothy] that keeps them from being consumed with bitterness." (262-263)
Belfast Protestant Malcolm Orr, 19, engaged to a Belfast Catholic woman, was shot dead for it. At his wake, "She was there with her family and many other Catholic families. Protestants were there and many many strangers and they prayed together." Malcolm's mother told the authors, "Revenge is empty." (265)
The authors conclude the book by saying that the I.R.A. can't win by force and lacks the support to win by votes, but "will never be able to leave its people to the 'tender mercy' of the jackals." (277)
The timeline in the Appendix says that Henry VIII's Catholic daughter Queen Mary, whose heritage centre we saw in 2015 in Ireland, started the first plantation, in 1556, "confiscating Counties Leix and Offaly." (281)
The Catholic-Protestant division is therefore newer, politically grafted onto the earlier English-Irish, colonial-independent conflicts. Perhaps unity won't come, Northern Ireland's colonial history conjoined to Scottish Presbyterianism being too different from the history of the rest of the island. Still, Ulster was the strongest anti-English part of Ireland before the Reformation and Plantations.
The authors note that the Republic of Ireland, which I have called Southern Ireland since Paul McGlinchey so named it in his I.R.A. memoir Truth Will Out, whose signing we attended in the Greyhound Pub in Duleek on September 23, does not want to welcome a million Protestants from Northern Ireland into a unified Ireland and island. "One island. One Ireland," McGlinchey's co-author Philomena Gallagher ended her McGlinchey introduction in the pub that night.
A personal ancestry note occurred to me as I read about the consequences of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, whose site we saw in 2017, in which Williams of Orange's Protestant army defeated James II's Catholic army and ensured that only Protestants would sit on the English throne. After the battle, Anglican English oppression of other religions in Ireland was hardest on Catholics, but also hurt Presbyterians.
Our mom's mom's mom was a Mahurin. Several generations earlier, Hugh Mahurin left Scotland or Ireland around 1690, the Hugh Mahurin website says. I put this lineage, which includes links to a Mayflower passenger, on my blog:
http://michaeljosephwynne.blogspot.ca/2017/07/ancestry-of-wynnes-going-back-to.html
If you can't open that link, then search the blog using the keywords "Mayflower" or "Mahurin." The link mentions the Mahurin ancestry after the Mayflower ancestry.
Was Hugh Mahurin a Scottish Presbyterian oppressed by English colonial laws against Presbyterians, Catholics, and other non-Anglicans? Does it matter now? One could crack up obsessing about history. I just wanted to write about this interesting book because I was recently in Ireland, North and South.
Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, its subtitle from the W.B. Yeats poem "Easter, 1916," which I read in my first year English course at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1979, is a 1978 edition of a 1975 book by Leon and Jill Uris. They wrote and published during the British Army occupation of Northern Ireland, and they like neither the army nor the province.
The Hill of Tara, ancient burial mounds, pre-Celtic migrants from Scandinavia and Scotland, perhaps via a land bridge 6000 years ago, Vikings, Normans, the Reformation, the government-induced famine of the 1840s, while cattle were exported, the 1916 events, Partition, Ulster "fascism" in the authors' words, and 1970s despair that peace will never come are in this book from this fall's used book sale in the mall in Williams Lake. Today, when I volunteer again at the sale, I'll return the book, so someone else can have it.
Here I'll write about the book, for my blog readers, especially my sister Maryanne, my 2015 and 2017 Ireland travel partner.
From "Ulster," the title of the last third of the book, here is the authors' view of one section of the police set up in Northern Ireland when Britain granted it province status around 1920:
"Of the auxiliaries, the B-specials, a civil militia of mostly Orangemen, were to gain a
well-deserved infamy for their brutal tactics."
"From the beginning, no protest ever failed to bring on a reaction of overkill. It was a
blunt instrument of totalitarianism. To back up those massive forces, a Special Powers
Act was legislated at the very start to enable this one-party government to arrest anyone
without warrant or reason and to hold him behind bars indefinitely without charges or
rights. It is small wonder this act would become a model law for later fascist regimes
in Europe." (176)
Later, describing Bloody Sunday, the January 30, 1972 British Army murder of 13 peaceful demonstrators among an unarmed crowd in Derry, and its aftermath British inquiry that condemned the army's behavior, the authors write, "if the British had given justice to Ulster's Catholics and had not invoked fascism through Internment, no protest would have been required." (220)
Here is the authors' third and last mention of fascism in Northern Ireland:
"[The British] know that the Ulster love of the Crown had the biggest Catch 22 of them all:
the proposition that Britain was going to be used to allow their quasi-fascist regime to
exist." (277)
Strong words.
Martin McGuinness is young in the book, whose authors would probably not "piss on his grave," unlike an old English man Maryanne met decades later said he would, upon hearing of McGuinness' peaceful death. "After the Battle of Bogside [1969], the I.R.A. Provos came under command of Martin McGuinness, a twenty-two-year-old butcher's apprentice." (215)
On the other side of the barricades, have one of several Orange chants the book quotes:
"A rope, a rope,
Tae hang the Pope!
A pennyworth o' cheese
Tae choke him!
A pint o' lamp oil
Tae wrench it down!
And a big hot give
Tae roast him!
When I was sick,
And very very sick,
And very near a-dying,
The only thing that raised me up
Was to see
The old whore frying!" (180-181)
A few paragraphs later, there's this amusing announcement from a pilot about to land at Belfast airport: "We are about the land in Ulster. Set your watches back 300 years." (181)
Page 214 is about John Hume, "A Voice in the Wilderness." Hume is "the best political brain on the island"and his Social Democratic Labor Party "the most illuminating lights in Ulster politics." The page ends, "it will fall to the John Humes to bring sanity" to Ulster. This later happened. I wonder if he's related to David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher from the 1700s.
A week before Bloody Sunday, in "COs Want Paras Restrained," Simon Hoggart writes in the January 25, 1972 Guardian of British Army units asking that the Parachute Regiment not enter Derry. One unit captain, unnamed, whose commander did not oppose the Paras in Derry, said the paras "seem to think they can get away with whatever they like." (221)
After Bloody Sunday, "the British Embassy was burned down by a Dublin mob." (278)
Father Edward Daly, whose statue we saw in 2017 in Derry, and I wonder if he's related to Sister Daly who taught me Catechism during my First Communion year, when I was 7, is in this book. On Bloody Sunday, he dodged British Army bullets to rescue shot teenagers. He told the authors, "it doesn't matter whether you have a Roman collar or a dog collar." Daly regularly evacuated old people before demonstrations and consequent army attacks. Daly's story, pages 222-24, ends by noting that a year after Bloody Sunday, the paratrooper commander was knighted.
Bloody Sunday gets much attention from the authors, writing only a couple years after it. The event still weighs on Ireland. We saw a demonstration about it outside Belfast City Hall in 2015.
Here are a couple pithy quotes:
"The British Army has performed with total consistency in Ireland since the
Reformation as an anti-Catholic force of conquest, occupation, and suppression."
(232)
"[Belfast] is the mongoloid child of British imperialism." (247)
Innocent Protestants in Ulster suffered, too. Stephan Parker, 14, whose Belfast liberal pastor father "sought Christian answers to the crushing events," died when a July, 1972 I.R.A. bomb blasted the grocery store where he worked. "There is something Godlike about Joe Parker and his wife [Dorothy] that keeps them from being consumed with bitterness." (262-263)
Belfast Protestant Malcolm Orr, 19, engaged to a Belfast Catholic woman, was shot dead for it. At his wake, "She was there with her family and many other Catholic families. Protestants were there and many many strangers and they prayed together." Malcolm's mother told the authors, "Revenge is empty." (265)
The authors conclude the book by saying that the I.R.A. can't win by force and lacks the support to win by votes, but "will never be able to leave its people to the 'tender mercy' of the jackals." (277)
The timeline in the Appendix says that Henry VIII's Catholic daughter Queen Mary, whose heritage centre we saw in 2015 in Ireland, started the first plantation, in 1556, "confiscating Counties Leix and Offaly." (281)
The Catholic-Protestant division is therefore newer, politically grafted onto the earlier English-Irish, colonial-independent conflicts. Perhaps unity won't come, Northern Ireland's colonial history conjoined to Scottish Presbyterianism being too different from the history of the rest of the island. Still, Ulster was the strongest anti-English part of Ireland before the Reformation and Plantations.
The authors note that the Republic of Ireland, which I have called Southern Ireland since Paul McGlinchey so named it in his I.R.A. memoir Truth Will Out, whose signing we attended in the Greyhound Pub in Duleek on September 23, does not want to welcome a million Protestants from Northern Ireland into a unified Ireland and island. "One island. One Ireland," McGlinchey's co-author Philomena Gallagher ended her McGlinchey introduction in the pub that night.
A personal ancestry note occurred to me as I read about the consequences of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, whose site we saw in 2017, in which Williams of Orange's Protestant army defeated James II's Catholic army and ensured that only Protestants would sit on the English throne. After the battle, Anglican English oppression of other religions in Ireland was hardest on Catholics, but also hurt Presbyterians.
Our mom's mom's mom was a Mahurin. Several generations earlier, Hugh Mahurin left Scotland or Ireland around 1690, the Hugh Mahurin website says. I put this lineage, which includes links to a Mayflower passenger, on my blog:
http://michaeljosephwynne.blogspot.ca/2017/07/ancestry-of-wynnes-going-back-to.html
If you can't open that link, then search the blog using the keywords "Mayflower" or "Mahurin." The link mentions the Mahurin ancestry after the Mayflower ancestry.
Was Hugh Mahurin a Scottish Presbyterian oppressed by English colonial laws against Presbyterians, Catholics, and other non-Anglicans? Does it matter now? One could crack up obsessing about history. I just wanted to write about this interesting book because I was recently in Ireland, North and South.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
2017 Ireland Ancient
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
I wrote the first five blog entries about my September, 2017 Ireland trip in five successive days, but this sixth entry I write several days later. The topic is 2017 Ireland Ancient, which got only a few days more ancient during my dawdling.
It's about the land. It has always been about the land, as the Irish, and other people, colonized or not, always knew. The fifth blog entry, 2017 Ireland Modern, started with mention of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, the start of Modern Ireland, I argued. Protestants defeated Catholics. Catholics continue to outnumber Protestants in Ireland, but the incipient capitalism that Protestantism strengthened eventually supplanted the feudalism that had buttressed Catholic rule for centuries. Feudalism ties peasants and lords to one another and to the land. I choose to start with ancient geography we found in Ireland, then describe pre-Christian and Medieval religious sites, and finally note evidence we found of vain Protestant attempts to erase Catholicism from Ireland.
Land is old, but rock is older. On the Antrim Coast on the northeast part of the island, we found The Giant's Causeway:
http://www.giantscausewayofficialguide.com/
Undersea volcanic eruptions eons ago made these hundreds of tall, skinny, hexagonal rocks, "but the people don't believe that," I've heard or read more than once. Finn MacCool, or Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish, was a mythical giant warrior who accepted a challenge from Benandonner, a giant who lived in what would become Scotland, across the sea from what would become Ireland. Finn built The Giant's Causeway to bridge the gap, but learning that Benandonner was bigger, Finn returned to Ireland. Benandonner pursued Finn, whom Finn's wife Oonagh dressed as a baby and put in a large cradle. When she told Benandonner not to wake the baby, lest the father be mad, Benandonner feared that the father was too big a match for him. Benandonner therefore fled back across the sea and destroyed most the the causeway behind him.
I wonder what the Scots think of this myth. Have they a myth to battle the Irish myth? Could a mythical causeway exist?
Moving ahead in time and south in direction, we found the Hill of Tara
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_of_Tara
The ancient people crowned kings here, and the rolling hills and round pits show where dwellings were. I have seen similar "pit house" features west of my home city of Williams Lake, in the land of the Tsilhqot'in, one of the area's Indigenous peoples. Pit houses are in many places:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit-house
Tara is one of many places Saint Patrick came much later, in the 400s, preaching Christianity to the people. Tara has a statue of Saint Patrick. Here and elsewhere, he explained the Trinity by using the shamrock, an iconic plant. As in the New World a millenia later, Christianity found receptive spiritual soil in Ireland. Pit houses abounded in the world. So did beliefs in supernatural explanations for natural objects and processes whose origins people did not understand. Where people once venerated Druidic kings, they would venerate Catholic bishops. Kings and bishops erected explanations of worlds seen and unseen, and gave the people their places in both.
Christian Ireland erected buildings as well as statues, and we saw plenty of both, sometimes by chance.
For example, we drove past a sign that said "Bective Abbey," and a couple kilometres away we found the ruins of an abbey dating from the 1500s, the original stonework from the 1100s gone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bective_Abbey
This was one film site for Braveheart., the film about William Wallace, who led Scots against English in the late-1100s. By then, the Anglo-Normans had built the first abbey here, centuries after Saint Patrick lived and died. Christianity therefore came to Ireland at least twice: once from England with Saint Patrick, and once from France via England after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. I remember thinking how soon this abbey went up after the Anglo-Normans came. I also liked how many arches, rooms, and levels were in this abbey. A centuries-old stone house was preserved nearby. What did dwellers in stone houses think of the incoming Anglo-Normans?
Another film site for Braveheart was Trim Castle, near where we had a picnic that included the last of the birthday cake my sister Maryanne made for me that week. Again, the Anglo-Normans built this impressive structure in the 1200-1300s, I recall from the nearby tourist centre. Indeed, the tourist centre had a copy of the coffin of Edward Longshanks, Edward II I think, and a stone casting of his body on top, in a back room. Edward was the English king who ringed Wales with forts, and similarly built structures to watch and control the Irish. The king gave a local lord taxing power, and the taxes built Trim Castle.
One might object that peasant labor and blood and the theft of peasant land built this and other monuments, to church and state. True. "But they are beautiful," the mid-1600s Republican English poet John Milton answered a Puritan who so objected. Is any Trump tower so beautiful, or lasting? When I asked the tourism centre man how the locals saw this castle project, he said, "They probably were happy to get the work." I suppose the man knows the Monty Python sketch against feudalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng
Today on CBC Radio One I heard an English author muse that King Arthur might have been a Briton rebelling against the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England. There were feudal battles for England before the winners ventured to bring English feudalism to Ireland, only to see industrialism replace it in each land.
Still, feudalism hung on longer in Ireland than in Britain, whose Industrial Revolution touched Belfast and other urban areas long before gathering the starving remnants of Irish peasantry into wage work by the late-1800s. This process had been nigh finished for a century in Britain by then. The Irish faced the Enclosure Movement via starvation and exile, not expropriation, unlike earlier in England, Scotland, and Wales.
A notable word about the building of the walled city of (London)Derry was that the city, like many British incursions into Ireland, was to be a "defensible" one. Circling oneself by a wall, like circling the wagons in the Old West of America, proves that one is in hostile territory, in a place where one is unwanted. Going to a place with an eye to defending oneself there proves that one suspects the locals are hostile to one's presence.
In 1613, King James I granted a charter to build Derry into a city archly loyal to the crown of England. This King James did more than authorize a new Bible, but even that book was an attempted improvement over the Catholic Bible, as Londonderry was an attempt to show the local Catholics an improved, Anglo-Protestant, way of life. There was other mention of this king in a Coleraine historic building which displayed the history of the Plantations, that is, land taken from Irish peasants and Catholic lords by gentry, mostly English, all Protestant. Oliver Cromwell deposed and decapitated James' son Charles I, but Cromwell continued with military force this plantation movement. In an Enniskillen public library book in 2015, I found mention of a police constable named Wynne who came from Wales to Ireland in 1642 with Cromwell's army.
Wynnes I know are more pro-Irish than pro-English, which fits a historical trend of incoming people adopting local ways. Thus the Anglo-Normans of the 1200s spawned generations who, by Cromwell's time in the 1600s, were pro-Irish, not pro-English, and therefore Cromwell battled them. Cromwell, was Republican, but he was pro-English, not pro-Irish. By 1798, the Protestant-begun Plantation System had spawned Protestants who were pro-Irish, not pro-English, such as the lawyer Wolf Tone, who that year helped in a rebellion against English rule of Ireland. Even Jonathan Swift of the early-1700s was an Irish person jaded by English rule. Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw openly opposed English rule of their Ireland. Swift, Wilde, and Shaw were Protestant. The struggle started Irish-English, not Catholic-Protestant, the latter hitched on much later. The Catholic Emancipation of 1829 conferred legal but not economic equality on Catholics,leading to generations of sectarian feuding that only calmed down since the late-1990s. "All You Need is Love:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyHN3LoRJ4
Dad, a Wynne, said that his mother, an Irish-born Irvine, the Protestant name of a family probably assimilated generations earlier to Catholicism, would not have liked The Troubles that began in the 1960s, had she lived past 1960 to see them. He also said he liked the British sense of justice and fair play. They then, like I now, no doubt saw Ireland through the filter of acquired experiences, views, and knowledge of this or that scrap of history.
Granny (Irvine) Wynne came to Canada in 1916, generations after Granny (Bender) Nasby's Mahurin ancestors left Scotland and soon after that Ireland, around 1690, the Battle of the Boyne year. Dad said that Granny Wynne had a brother who was a cop, in what would have been Colonial Ireland. Granny Nasby might have had an ancestor who was a Plantation whipman. All these ancestors, and my two grannies, were economic migrants first, moving to make a living. We who condemn their choices of employment have the luxuries of time, geography, material security, and most of all ignorance.
Traveling in Ireland in 2015 and 2017 made me less ignorant, and therefore less arrogant.
I wrote the first five blog entries about my September, 2017 Ireland trip in five successive days, but this sixth entry I write several days later. The topic is 2017 Ireland Ancient, which got only a few days more ancient during my dawdling.
It's about the land. It has always been about the land, as the Irish, and other people, colonized or not, always knew. The fifth blog entry, 2017 Ireland Modern, started with mention of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, the start of Modern Ireland, I argued. Protestants defeated Catholics. Catholics continue to outnumber Protestants in Ireland, but the incipient capitalism that Protestantism strengthened eventually supplanted the feudalism that had buttressed Catholic rule for centuries. Feudalism ties peasants and lords to one another and to the land. I choose to start with ancient geography we found in Ireland, then describe pre-Christian and Medieval religious sites, and finally note evidence we found of vain Protestant attempts to erase Catholicism from Ireland.
Land is old, but rock is older. On the Antrim Coast on the northeast part of the island, we found The Giant's Causeway:
http://www.giantscausewayofficialguide.com/
Undersea volcanic eruptions eons ago made these hundreds of tall, skinny, hexagonal rocks, "but the people don't believe that," I've heard or read more than once. Finn MacCool, or Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish, was a mythical giant warrior who accepted a challenge from Benandonner, a giant who lived in what would become Scotland, across the sea from what would become Ireland. Finn built The Giant's Causeway to bridge the gap, but learning that Benandonner was bigger, Finn returned to Ireland. Benandonner pursued Finn, whom Finn's wife Oonagh dressed as a baby and put in a large cradle. When she told Benandonner not to wake the baby, lest the father be mad, Benandonner feared that the father was too big a match for him. Benandonner therefore fled back across the sea and destroyed most the the causeway behind him.
I wonder what the Scots think of this myth. Have they a myth to battle the Irish myth? Could a mythical causeway exist?
Moving ahead in time and south in direction, we found the Hill of Tara
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_of_Tara
The ancient people crowned kings here, and the rolling hills and round pits show where dwellings were. I have seen similar "pit house" features west of my home city of Williams Lake, in the land of the Tsilhqot'in, one of the area's Indigenous peoples. Pit houses are in many places:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit-house
Tara is one of many places Saint Patrick came much later, in the 400s, preaching Christianity to the people. Tara has a statue of Saint Patrick. Here and elsewhere, he explained the Trinity by using the shamrock, an iconic plant. As in the New World a millenia later, Christianity found receptive spiritual soil in Ireland. Pit houses abounded in the world. So did beliefs in supernatural explanations for natural objects and processes whose origins people did not understand. Where people once venerated Druidic kings, they would venerate Catholic bishops. Kings and bishops erected explanations of worlds seen and unseen, and gave the people their places in both.
Christian Ireland erected buildings as well as statues, and we saw plenty of both, sometimes by chance.
For example, we drove past a sign that said "Bective Abbey," and a couple kilometres away we found the ruins of an abbey dating from the 1500s, the original stonework from the 1100s gone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bective_Abbey
This was one film site for Braveheart., the film about William Wallace, who led Scots against English in the late-1100s. By then, the Anglo-Normans had built the first abbey here, centuries after Saint Patrick lived and died. Christianity therefore came to Ireland at least twice: once from England with Saint Patrick, and once from France via England after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. I remember thinking how soon this abbey went up after the Anglo-Normans came. I also liked how many arches, rooms, and levels were in this abbey. A centuries-old stone house was preserved nearby. What did dwellers in stone houses think of the incoming Anglo-Normans?
Another film site for Braveheart was Trim Castle, near where we had a picnic that included the last of the birthday cake my sister Maryanne made for me that week. Again, the Anglo-Normans built this impressive structure in the 1200-1300s, I recall from the nearby tourist centre. Indeed, the tourist centre had a copy of the coffin of Edward Longshanks, Edward II I think, and a stone casting of his body on top, in a back room. Edward was the English king who ringed Wales with forts, and similarly built structures to watch and control the Irish. The king gave a local lord taxing power, and the taxes built Trim Castle.
One might object that peasant labor and blood and the theft of peasant land built this and other monuments, to church and state. True. "But they are beautiful," the mid-1600s Republican English poet John Milton answered a Puritan who so objected. Is any Trump tower so beautiful, or lasting? When I asked the tourism centre man how the locals saw this castle project, he said, "They probably were happy to get the work." I suppose the man knows the Monty Python sketch against feudalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng
Today on CBC Radio One I heard an English author muse that King Arthur might have been a Briton rebelling against the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England. There were feudal battles for England before the winners ventured to bring English feudalism to Ireland, only to see industrialism replace it in each land.
Still, feudalism hung on longer in Ireland than in Britain, whose Industrial Revolution touched Belfast and other urban areas long before gathering the starving remnants of Irish peasantry into wage work by the late-1800s. This process had been nigh finished for a century in Britain by then. The Irish faced the Enclosure Movement via starvation and exile, not expropriation, unlike earlier in England, Scotland, and Wales.
A notable word about the building of the walled city of (London)Derry was that the city, like many British incursions into Ireland, was to be a "defensible" one. Circling oneself by a wall, like circling the wagons in the Old West of America, proves that one is in hostile territory, in a place where one is unwanted. Going to a place with an eye to defending oneself there proves that one suspects the locals are hostile to one's presence.
In 1613, King James I granted a charter to build Derry into a city archly loyal to the crown of England. This King James did more than authorize a new Bible, but even that book was an attempted improvement over the Catholic Bible, as Londonderry was an attempt to show the local Catholics an improved, Anglo-Protestant, way of life. There was other mention of this king in a Coleraine historic building which displayed the history of the Plantations, that is, land taken from Irish peasants and Catholic lords by gentry, mostly English, all Protestant. Oliver Cromwell deposed and decapitated James' son Charles I, but Cromwell continued with military force this plantation movement. In an Enniskillen public library book in 2015, I found mention of a police constable named Wynne who came from Wales to Ireland in 1642 with Cromwell's army.
Wynnes I know are more pro-Irish than pro-English, which fits a historical trend of incoming people adopting local ways. Thus the Anglo-Normans of the 1200s spawned generations who, by Cromwell's time in the 1600s, were pro-Irish, not pro-English, and therefore Cromwell battled them. Cromwell, was Republican, but he was pro-English, not pro-Irish. By 1798, the Protestant-begun Plantation System had spawned Protestants who were pro-Irish, not pro-English, such as the lawyer Wolf Tone, who that year helped in a rebellion against English rule of Ireland. Even Jonathan Swift of the early-1700s was an Irish person jaded by English rule. Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw openly opposed English rule of their Ireland. Swift, Wilde, and Shaw were Protestant. The struggle started Irish-English, not Catholic-Protestant, the latter hitched on much later. The Catholic Emancipation of 1829 conferred legal but not economic equality on Catholics,leading to generations of sectarian feuding that only calmed down since the late-1990s. "All You Need is Love:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyHN3LoRJ4
Dad, a Wynne, said that his mother, an Irish-born Irvine, the Protestant name of a family probably assimilated generations earlier to Catholicism, would not have liked The Troubles that began in the 1960s, had she lived past 1960 to see them. He also said he liked the British sense of justice and fair play. They then, like I now, no doubt saw Ireland through the filter of acquired experiences, views, and knowledge of this or that scrap of history.
Granny (Irvine) Wynne came to Canada in 1916, generations after Granny (Bender) Nasby's Mahurin ancestors left Scotland and soon after that Ireland, around 1690, the Battle of the Boyne year. Dad said that Granny Wynne had a brother who was a cop, in what would have been Colonial Ireland. Granny Nasby might have had an ancestor who was a Plantation whipman. All these ancestors, and my two grannies, were economic migrants first, moving to make a living. We who condemn their choices of employment have the luxuries of time, geography, material security, and most of all ignorance.
Traveling in Ireland in 2015 and 2017 made me less ignorant, and therefore less arrogant.
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
2017 Ireland Modern
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
This fifth blog entry about my September, 2017 trip to Ireland describes modern history there, contrary to the traditional expectation that a person writes first of ancient history. Later, I will write of ancient history elements I saw in Ireland. I agree with the view that the present is largely a product of the past, but describing the modern first might entice readers to infer the ancient. When I describe the ancient, they can see if they inferred correctly. Indeed, some ancient aspects of Ireland had little or no modern consequences.
How about 1690 as the start of modern Irish history? That year, The Battle of the Boyne strengthened Protestant ascendancy for generations to come. The Protestant Reformation in England, more than 150 years old, finally ensured that only Protestants would be monarchs. The 1688 forcing off the throne of King James II, the last reigning Catholic, his failure to recapture the throne via the Battle of the Boyne, and the strengthening of the Plantation system begun centuries earlier and enforced bloodily by Oliver Cromwell's armies in the 1650s, set in motion modern Ireland, in war and peace, in colonialism and liberation.
I walked around the remaining stone buildings of the Village of Oldbridge, the site of an important engagement of the Battle of the Boyne. Landscapers and gardeners trimmed and coiffed the foliage that now stands on the couple square kilometres of ground whose 1690 battle shaped modern Irish history.
The manor house, now the interpretive centre, built a half-century after 1690 the Coddington family, was in that family's possession until the descendants emigrated to Canada in the mid-1900s, one guide said.
The site is in Southern Ireland, the Republic, and one display says that the government only recently gives due attention to the Battle of the Boyne. I don't recall the exact words, but the sense seemed to be that the Battle was not all negative. Beside the words was a large 2006 photo of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern shaking hands with Ian Paisley, who spent decades undermining Irish unity and finally reconciled with Ireland late in life.
Between 1690 and 2006, Ireland thrived, starved, found peace and war, and in only the last couple decades began to reconcile with its past and many factions.
Many Catholic churches went up after the 1829 British revocation of laws oppressing Catholics, Baptists, and other non-Anglicans. Still, echoes of earlier days exist in many modern churches. St. Peter's Church in Drogheda, for example, built in 1884, contains the head of Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic Archbishop executed in 1681 "for promoting the Roman faith."
Wikipedia goes on to say that Plunkett's head went to a Benedictine monastery in Germany in 1683, and by 1921 the head was in Rome. Then it returned to Ireland, and it has been in St. Peter's Church in Drogheda ever since.
The 1916 Easter Uprising centenary was in 2016. I wonder if there will be a Plunkett head centenary in 2021.
The 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic surely graces other places besides the General Post Office in Dublin, whose shrine to the failed Easter uprising I saw in 2015. The British execution of 15 leaders outraged the Irish enough to overturn British rule in 26 of 32 counties by 1922. The Proclamation was in a store window in Slane, for example. A shelf of biographies of the 15 executed leaders is at eye level near the entrance to Connolly's Bookshop in Dublin. James Connolly was one of the executed leaders. Their bodies went to a mass, unmarked grave, increasing Irish outrage. Would the General Post Office display Connolly's head if it had it? Here is "Irish Rebel," about Connolly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEmy8nif7J8
I noticed little 1916 commemoration in Northern Ireland, a predictable lack, given its continuing colony status. One thing I read in the Portrush public library, in a book of Catholic Irish history, or a book of Royal Irish Constabulary history, was a strong phrase in a passage describing negotiations for peace leading to the 1922 partition of Ireland. Britain had already created Northern Ireland in 1920, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George "put his gun on the table" during negotiations about the rest of the island. The British seemed ready and able to fight to retain the rest of the island, but thought better of it.
I saw little 1916 history in "Ireland's Ancient East," that is, the Boyne River Valley and Irish Sea coast north of Dublin.
Plunkett's well-traveled head rolled around Europe for a few centuries. I found movements arguably lasting millenia, such as the devotions tree at the Hill of Tara site. Tara is a site of many mounds, where the Irish crowned kings before Christianity came in the 400s. A spreading, leafy tree at the site sported hundreds of pieces of paper with written prayers and pleas, memory articles, and other items to gain supernatural help for those in need, alive or dead. The ancient people of Ireland, before there was such a name, were not like the middle-aged Catholic woman who assured me that the tree we beheld was powerful, or were they? Granny said that Catholicism was a hard faith to live by, but an easy faith to die by. Granny is in one piece in a graveyard in Edmonton, Canada; I think.
In Dublin, I read on an O'Connell Street plinth a clever quotation from Sean O'Casey, about people and dignity and freedom. There was a Famine Museum and a Leprechaun Museum we did not visit, but one of the first photo opportunities was me standing beside a statue of James Joyce. I suppose someone has counted the number of public sites that mention this early-1900s writer.
Somewhere I saw mention that Daniel O'Connell, the mid-1800s Catholic lawyer activist for Irish home, spoke to audiences of more than 300 000 in the fields outside Dublin in the early-1840s.
Then the late-1840s Hunger intervened, made worse by a British change of government to one opposing the distribution of food and encouraging emigration. I'd read this in an Irish history book since my 2015 trip there. Sinead O'Connor's "Famine" explains the contemporary consequences of this 1840s disaster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZIB6MslCAo
The British parliament had a home rule law ready in 1912, before World War One intervened, and Northern Irish Protestants demanded their own "statelet," in the words of their critics. The 1920 creation of Northern Ireland, like the 1947 creation of India and Pakistan, ensured decades of discord and violence. "Where you see two birds fighting, look for an Englishman, who probably started the fight," a Balkan friend once quoted a quip from his region. Angry birds indeed.
Somewhere else I read about revolutionary sentiments spreading to Ireland after the 1789 French Revolution. I saw mention of the 1798 uprising under Protestant lawyer Wolf Tone, and I knew about that; but the 1800 British Act of Union welding Ireland to Britain was news to me. I knew that a similar 1707 law joined Scotland to Britain.
The modern sentiment I noticed the most was that Irish people are Europeans, despite having had to vote two times to join the European Union. "People didn't understand what they were voting for the first time," an arch-Republican woman told me while she, her husband, and I walked the Boyne battle grounds. "The second time, they understood, and voted to join Europe." Everyone I asked saw the recent British vote to leave Europe as a mistake that will reduce diversity and therefore the quality of life. The U.S. group Chicago advises against breakup, in "If You Leave Me Now:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJNVc6CZGBQ
I found in modern Ireland a sense of the long as well as of the short term. People know much about the past, but they live in the present. It is always the present, for everyone; but the past helps make us who we are. "The Who" asks "Who Are You," as I conclude this fifth blog entry about my September, 2017 Ireland trip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5modnIBpqTQ
This fifth blog entry about my September, 2017 trip to Ireland describes modern history there, contrary to the traditional expectation that a person writes first of ancient history. Later, I will write of ancient history elements I saw in Ireland. I agree with the view that the present is largely a product of the past, but describing the modern first might entice readers to infer the ancient. When I describe the ancient, they can see if they inferred correctly. Indeed, some ancient aspects of Ireland had little or no modern consequences.
How about 1690 as the start of modern Irish history? That year, The Battle of the Boyne strengthened Protestant ascendancy for generations to come. The Protestant Reformation in England, more than 150 years old, finally ensured that only Protestants would be monarchs. The 1688 forcing off the throne of King James II, the last reigning Catholic, his failure to recapture the throne via the Battle of the Boyne, and the strengthening of the Plantation system begun centuries earlier and enforced bloodily by Oliver Cromwell's armies in the 1650s, set in motion modern Ireland, in war and peace, in colonialism and liberation.
I walked around the remaining stone buildings of the Village of Oldbridge, the site of an important engagement of the Battle of the Boyne. Landscapers and gardeners trimmed and coiffed the foliage that now stands on the couple square kilometres of ground whose 1690 battle shaped modern Irish history.
The manor house, now the interpretive centre, built a half-century after 1690 the Coddington family, was in that family's possession until the descendants emigrated to Canada in the mid-1900s, one guide said.
The site is in Southern Ireland, the Republic, and one display says that the government only recently gives due attention to the Battle of the Boyne. I don't recall the exact words, but the sense seemed to be that the Battle was not all negative. Beside the words was a large 2006 photo of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern shaking hands with Ian Paisley, who spent decades undermining Irish unity and finally reconciled with Ireland late in life.
Between 1690 and 2006, Ireland thrived, starved, found peace and war, and in only the last couple decades began to reconcile with its past and many factions.
Many Catholic churches went up after the 1829 British revocation of laws oppressing Catholics, Baptists, and other non-Anglicans. Still, echoes of earlier days exist in many modern churches. St. Peter's Church in Drogheda, for example, built in 1884, contains the head of Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic Archbishop executed in 1681 "for promoting the Roman faith."
Wikipedia goes on to say that Plunkett's head went to a Benedictine monastery in Germany in 1683, and by 1921 the head was in Rome. Then it returned to Ireland, and it has been in St. Peter's Church in Drogheda ever since.
The 1916 Easter Uprising centenary was in 2016. I wonder if there will be a Plunkett head centenary in 2021.
The 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic surely graces other places besides the General Post Office in Dublin, whose shrine to the failed Easter uprising I saw in 2015. The British execution of 15 leaders outraged the Irish enough to overturn British rule in 26 of 32 counties by 1922. The Proclamation was in a store window in Slane, for example. A shelf of biographies of the 15 executed leaders is at eye level near the entrance to Connolly's Bookshop in Dublin. James Connolly was one of the executed leaders. Their bodies went to a mass, unmarked grave, increasing Irish outrage. Would the General Post Office display Connolly's head if it had it? Here is "Irish Rebel," about Connolly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEmy8nif7J8
I noticed little 1916 commemoration in Northern Ireland, a predictable lack, given its continuing colony status. One thing I read in the Portrush public library, in a book of Catholic Irish history, or a book of Royal Irish Constabulary history, was a strong phrase in a passage describing negotiations for peace leading to the 1922 partition of Ireland. Britain had already created Northern Ireland in 1920, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George "put his gun on the table" during negotiations about the rest of the island. The British seemed ready and able to fight to retain the rest of the island, but thought better of it.
I saw little 1916 history in "Ireland's Ancient East," that is, the Boyne River Valley and Irish Sea coast north of Dublin.
Plunkett's well-traveled head rolled around Europe for a few centuries. I found movements arguably lasting millenia, such as the devotions tree at the Hill of Tara site. Tara is a site of many mounds, where the Irish crowned kings before Christianity came in the 400s. A spreading, leafy tree at the site sported hundreds of pieces of paper with written prayers and pleas, memory articles, and other items to gain supernatural help for those in need, alive or dead. The ancient people of Ireland, before there was such a name, were not like the middle-aged Catholic woman who assured me that the tree we beheld was powerful, or were they? Granny said that Catholicism was a hard faith to live by, but an easy faith to die by. Granny is in one piece in a graveyard in Edmonton, Canada; I think.
In Dublin, I read on an O'Connell Street plinth a clever quotation from Sean O'Casey, about people and dignity and freedom. There was a Famine Museum and a Leprechaun Museum we did not visit, but one of the first photo opportunities was me standing beside a statue of James Joyce. I suppose someone has counted the number of public sites that mention this early-1900s writer.
Somewhere I saw mention that Daniel O'Connell, the mid-1800s Catholic lawyer activist for Irish home, spoke to audiences of more than 300 000 in the fields outside Dublin in the early-1840s.
Then the late-1840s Hunger intervened, made worse by a British change of government to one opposing the distribution of food and encouraging emigration. I'd read this in an Irish history book since my 2015 trip there. Sinead O'Connor's "Famine" explains the contemporary consequences of this 1840s disaster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZIB6MslCAo
The British parliament had a home rule law ready in 1912, before World War One intervened, and Northern Irish Protestants demanded their own "statelet," in the words of their critics. The 1920 creation of Northern Ireland, like the 1947 creation of India and Pakistan, ensured decades of discord and violence. "Where you see two birds fighting, look for an Englishman, who probably started the fight," a Balkan friend once quoted a quip from his region. Angry birds indeed.
Somewhere else I read about revolutionary sentiments spreading to Ireland after the 1789 French Revolution. I saw mention of the 1798 uprising under Protestant lawyer Wolf Tone, and I knew about that; but the 1800 British Act of Union welding Ireland to Britain was news to me. I knew that a similar 1707 law joined Scotland to Britain.
The modern sentiment I noticed the most was that Irish people are Europeans, despite having had to vote two times to join the European Union. "People didn't understand what they were voting for the first time," an arch-Republican woman told me while she, her husband, and I walked the Boyne battle grounds. "The second time, they understood, and voted to join Europe." Everyone I asked saw the recent British vote to leave Europe as a mistake that will reduce diversity and therefore the quality of life. The U.S. group Chicago advises against breakup, in "If You Leave Me Now:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJNVc6CZGBQ
I found in modern Ireland a sense of the long as well as of the short term. People know much about the past, but they live in the present. It is always the present, for everyone; but the past helps make us who we are. "The Who" asks "Who Are You," as I conclude this fifth blog entry about my September, 2017 Ireland trip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5modnIBpqTQ
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